Superfeedr

Julien Genestoux's Superfeedr is a service that pulls in content feeds from around the Web and then offers updates for those feeds in XMPP or PubSubHubbub format. It's like FeedBurner for the real-time web and in fact just added publisher analytics ala FeedBurner today. Superfeedr is a key enabler for other applications and if you want an interesting view into the nitty gritty of the real-time web, you should go subscribe to the Superfeedr company blog right now.

Genestoux says the companies using his service so far include SixApart, Adobe, Twitterfeed, StatusNet and a number of small services such as Webwag, EventVue, Quub, AppNotifications, Excla.im and SmackSale. That's an impressive list and your company could well be on it by next year.

Tornado

This September, Facebook open-sourced the newly acquired FriendFeed's real-time infrastructure. It's a fast, relatively easy way to add real-time flow to your application and developers around the world are excited about it. We're all about the potential here at ReadWriteWeb and we think Tornado has a lot of it. We hope to see big things from this project next year.

Breaking News Online's iPhone App

Breaking News Online is an international news organization founded by now 19 year old Netherlands native Michael van Poppel. Van Poppel somehow sold a video of Ossama Bin Laden to Reuters two years ago and has since built up the fastest, smallest news organization on the planet. The American Red Cross watches BNO closely for notices of new natural disasters. MSNBC paid what appears to have been a hefty sum for control over the Breaking News Online Twitter account this month, but the organization's iPhone app lives on in the hands of the original organization.

It's a simple app but one that will keep you on top of world events around the clock like nothing else. It's a great use of the iPhone's new Push feature, implemented this year.

Aardvark

Aardvark is a social search engine that combines artificial intelligence, natural-language processing and presence data to create what the company calls "the real-time Web of people." It's got some heavy engineering behind it and this author uses it almost every day. Google is reportedly in the process of trying to buy it.

Cliqset

We love a good technical standard and stream reader startup Cliqset is blazing new trails with its new real-time ActivityStreams feed normalization API. The API means activities from 70 different social services can be read in a common language and 3rd party services can slice and dice them to create new user experiences. Several high-profile applications have already begun consuming activity feeds republished through Cliqset and the company says many more consumers are in the works. This is the stuff that distributed, interoperable platforms are built on, where small innovators have access to economies of scale.

Those are our picks! Check them out, let us know who we missed and get ready for a coming time when most of the web will be running in real time!